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I witnessed and was approximate to so much of the same weird shit in Vancouver, where people discuss housing like Texans talk about weather. I’m very wary of any subsidized housing project geared towards artists—so many icky complications

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It's the bait and switch that makes me the most annoyed. Like, come on man, put "luxe" somewhere in the headline and save me a click.

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Thinking yet again about the apartments I shared with friends where our cut was somewhere between $233-350 a month, the janky-but-safe-roof-over-my-head $300/month duplex that a pastor friend (whose family now has their own housing struggles in Berlin working with Syrian refugees who have even harder housing struggles) rented to me when my living situation in my mid-20s became abusive. I never paid more than $600 a month in rent in Cleveland until I bought a house when I saw the rents everywhere double as private equity scooped up everything and people here got greedy. The rust belt was great for this once if you had a halfway decent job /good roommates. It's not anymore, and I think a lot about how all this "creative class" stuff ends up being trickle-down economics for the NPR crowd, I always remembered Detroit being cheaper and then I was horrified the last time I snooped around Zillow up there.

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